What conservatives really don't like is having spaces designed specifically for their exclusion, or for the inclusion of people they feel should be not seen, nor heard, nor spoken to.

My house is a "safe space" for the people who live in the house, myself included. When I go into a class for mathematics it is a "safe space" for mathematics, the students, etc. If I start a club on campus for reading books, it is a "safe space" in a sense.

I used the iPad Pro as my only computer when I was in college. I already have a gaming PC, so owning a laptop and then having a computer in the next room... and then having an iPad didn't make sense to me. I like watching YouTube or browsing the web on my iPad, I like reading comics on it. But when I'm at home I almost never used my MacBook when I had a more powerful gaming PC nextdoor.

How did it work for me? Pretty well. Thankfully I didn't have to run any special software (programing, math stuff, etc). For writing my papers, doing presentations, research it worked perfectly fine. I wrote my documents on the iPad, saved a copy in my school's OneDrive, and then accessed them at school via my email.

I couldn't imagine having an iPad Pro as my entire computer, being a PC gamer and doing other stuff it just can't do that need my computer. But, I don't see why anyone should buy a laptop and own a desktop. As far as laptops go, it works really well.

Mount and Blade is made for this. The game is so simple: you travel around the overworld map, engage on battles on the ground with the troops you recruit, can join factions, start your own kingdom, develop relationships with nobles, do quests.

Most mods change the entire game, taking you out of Caldara and into the world of Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings. They introduce better AI, more quests, more personality, new weapons and animations, and even new mechanics. Its rare you play a game where its mods feel like the next major update by the developers, or an entire new-lands DLC.

Gandhi was basically politically irrelevant when India gained its independence. He was important for his contributions to philosophy regarding independence, Indian nationalism, and how regular people could resist imperialism (without having to throw bombs in the parliament buildings). But Gandhi did not free India.

Mount & Blade: I've literally put around 400 hours into this game, and it's one of my favorites. It can be punishingly hard, and time seems to double when you're playing. It's rewarding, but it'll require you to forge a powerful army, be smart with how you engage in battles, and will require time.

One of my favorite gaming moments is launching a rebellion against my king, stealing away half of his nobles, fighting victorious battles against him until he left the realm and his most powerful and loyal lords were mine to control... and then, the rest of the realms sensed that I had overextended my empire, there was disloyalty among my lords who were too many and too poorly rewarded. They attacked me, my own men turned on me, and I was left with a crumbling empire.

The game is fantastic. BUT, I'm not sure how well it plays on a controller. Not to mention, the various mods for the game are THE reason why it's so good. The game itself is fairly simple, so modders can essentially make entirely new games (with the same mechanics and ideas) that radically make things different, or better. That's the fun of Mount and Blade. Playing in 1000's England and managing religions. Hardcore mods that make it so seven men is like an army. Mods that make you overpowered and give you magic. Guns. There's so much there that you'd be missing out on.

Honestly, I played the game on a laptop for most of my early PC gaming career. An Intel HD 3000. If your laptop is newer than 2010, you can run the game.

In an RPG, depth is best said by your ability to master the mechanics; story-based (dialogue options, quest objectives, decisions and actions made by player) and combat-based (weapon types, upgrades, knowledge of how to beat the enemy, etc).

Imagine a good player verses a bad player. If you have a video game that doesn't have great depth, it is a game with very little differences between the expert and the casual player. There aren't many tricks one can pull off in Skyrim. And its story is fairly inflexible, you cannot make major decisions, you do not have to navigate choices and outcomes--a skilled player can set up their characters in a way to access side quests, hidden endings, hidden areas, new weapons or even abilities, they can choose the right companions, the right character-race, the right dialogue options, go to the right hidden objectives and result in an outcome in the game's world completely different than the person playing the quest for the first time, or doing it the same way each time.

Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, CS:GO, all that requires mastery and ability for gameplay--depth.

KOTOR II, Dragon Age Origins, the Witcher 3 all offer experienced and observant players different experiences and greater control (either, by themselves exploiting the game's outcomes, or the game exerting control over their character as a result of his or her actions).

That's what I'd define as depth. Skyrim is a popcorn game. Every piece is the same. No quests end up radically different because you chose something. There are no roadblocks that you can impose on yourself due to your actions. For CRPGs, it's fun to navigate the world first as a human, then as an elf, then good, then evil; seeing how different missions open up, how different areas are bypassed, how different characters will react to you, etc. Skyrim is relatively the same experience for all players, of all skill levels. No one beats the game with a guitar hero controller, that would not be an impressive or engaging feat for Skyrim. The Witcher doesn't offer more in gameplay than Skyrim does, but it offers player agency and choice in story. And that's what makes it deeper. Not nearly as deep as older CRPGs, but since it's all fully 3D, action-oriented and voiced that makes it impressive as Baulder's Gate was all text based and simpler graphics.

I think Ansari might be a little more guilty of not being a mind reader...

Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward.

“Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points,” she said. “I stopped moving my lips and turned cold.” [...] Whether Ansari didn’t notice Grace’s reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say. “I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn’t interested. I don’t think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored.”

“I said I don’t want to feel forced because then I’ll hate you, and I’d rather not hate you,” she said. [...] she was happy with how he reacted. “He said, ‘Oh, of course, it’s only fun if we’re both having fun.’ [...] This moment is particularly significant for Grace, because she thought that would be the end of the sexual encounter [...] Ansari instructed her to turn around. “He sat back and pointed to his penis and motioned for me to go down on him. And I did. I think I just felt really pressured. It was literally the most unexpected thing I thought would happen at that moment because I told him I was uncomfortable.”

Soon, he pulled her back up onto the couch. She would tell her friend via text later that night, “He [made out] with me again and says, ‘Doesn’t look like you hate me.’”

“After he bent me over is when I stood up and said no, I don’t think I’m ready to do this, I really don’t think I’m going to do this. And he said, ‘How about we just chill, but this time with our clothes on?’”

While the TV played in the background, he kissed her again, stuck his fingers down her throat again, and moved to undo her pants. She turned away.

“I remember saying, ‘You guys are all the same, you guys are all the fucking same.’” Ansari asked her what she meant. When she turned to answer, she says he met her with “gross, forceful kisses.”

After that last kiss, Grace stood up from the couch, moved back to the kitchen island where she left her phone, and said she would call herself a car. He hugged her and kissed her goodbye, another “aggressive” kiss. When she pulled away, Ansari finally relented...

If they were playing baseball, that's a lot more than three strikes. She literally multiple times told him, "I don't want to do this." and his response was, "how about now?" I wouldn't say this is rape, but this is definitely Ansari not knowing basic body language, or ignoring it, and trying to wear her down and get her drunk. I don't know how you can be of that age, obviously personable and (unassumingly) have experience yet not be able to take a direct response like that. Grace's story is important because many men don't really understand how to interact sexually with women, and I get the feeling there are a lot of people who look at that date and say, "Yeah that's pretty normal, I do that all the time". Think about how many /r/niceguys there are, or people who regularly fill up /r/creepypms. There's obviously a good number of people who are guilty of trying coerce or wear down people into having sex with them, clearly knowing that at the moment it is unwanted but thinking to themselves, "Well, maybe if I keep asking them they'll eventually say accept, or just stop fighting the small advances."

It would be both a mistake to equate Aziz Ansari's actions to rape, or to think that what he did was acceptable and harmless.

I have a 980, I don't see myself ever being below 1080p@60fps, and games in my opinion have looked pretty amazing for the past half decade. I personally wont be upgrading for a long long time, but for friends of mine trying to get into PC gaming it's hard to recommend them affordable GPUs with all these massive price increases.

But don't worry, Crypto will crash and the market will be flooded with cheap GPUs.

North Korea starting a war would be illogical. But, the West like to paint them as an illogical and insane country, so to many people it does seem logical that they'd do something like that. But, it's important to remember that a full fledged nuclear war with North Korea would be relatively one-sided--North Korea being terminated, South Korea now being the 'isle of Korea' as there is no North anymore, and maybe a singular missile heading towards Hawaii but it crashes into the sea. They have nothing to gain from starting a nuclear war, but they have a lot to gain by having nuclear weapons. Going to war with a nation that has nuclear weapons is a scary idea, and even if North Korea can't launch them effectively at the U.S. they still could target U.S. military and South Korea, Japan with those weapons. They are essentially becoming untouchable in the same way that other nuclear powers are untouchable due to their nuke-advantage over other countries.

Basically, North Korea has accomplished their goals of being "untouchable" by future-U.S. invasions. They've seen whats happened to Libya and Iraq, and they still remember the Korean War. Now that they have accomplished this, I think it's reasonable to assume they will start making greater demands of the world, namely to participate in the global economy and to be treated like a legitimate power.

There's an interesting connection between the eugenicist movement and the birth control movement--not in an "birth control is eugenics" virtue signalling that apathetic white conservatives play towards young and diverse pro-choice supporters.

The people who had money also had interest in reducing the non-white populations, they also felt that there were some "morons" who were too attractive and thus if we didn't do anything we'd be a society of non-whites and attractive morons. Many feminists were interested in birth control because prior to that era, women spent a significant part of their time pregnant and didn't really have control over their bodies. Child birth was very dangerous, and many women didn't want to have 5-7 children, they wanted 1-2 children and they also wanted to still have sex. The early day pioneers of birth control and women's healthcare found that it could only get popular support if it courted the eugenics movement. Poor people and women of color couldn't afford early contraceptives.

Normally I’m pretty sick of this alarmism, but that’s a powerful and relevant quote used. It’s important to realize that Trump is merely an offensive idiot with a cult of personality and illusion around him. The Republican Party seek to re-Christianize the nation, advance imperialism abroad, and aid in the upward flow of wealth from poor to rich due to their belief that the poor could become wealthy if they were to “work hard” and be smart—thus don’t deserve a single cent from anyone; whereas the rich have a lot of money, thus must work x amount of times harder and be x times smarter directly proportional to their wealth. Lots of people seem to think that if you cut the head off the hydra, things will go back to normal. People are desprate for someone like Obama or Bush to come to power, but I fear that such a thing would give almost a blank check almost the same exact things but in a less offensive and orange package.

I’d also like to add: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy then as a joke.

Media plays a key point in shaping our perspective on geopolitical issues. Look at Iraq and the media during the time of the war. They shaped the public’s beliefs that America should go to war in the region to accomplish a series of geopolitical objectives. Imagine the bizarro universe where the media was firmly against the Iraq war and so was the public, the geopolitical goals of the war would have had to been changed otherwise people would have gotten too angry at the government and put their objectives in an awkward position.

I see them as being one in the same. I’m not really interested in the raw unprocessed projections of power one country plays. I don’t really see geopolitics as a game of chess, but as a novel or a story. Media, and the critcism of that media, tells us who is the players, what they are aiming for, and how they are attempting to accomplish it.

Jewish people were a minority in the region from 500 CE till the 1950s, according to Sergio Della Pergola’s demographics claims. Your claims that the Jewish people were just taking back their homeland would make more sense if they had been kicked out due to British colonalism or Turkish empire. But they’ve been a minority in that region for a very long time, Christians have had a larger population in the region for a longer number of years than Jewish people have since the Roman times.

Also, you’re making some of the same claims about Palestinians in Israel that South Africa made about Blacks in SA. I think I can dig up a few pro-apartheid writings and you can see for yourself, if you’d like.

I think that depends on your interpretation of “native”. If you mean born on a piece of land, sure. By that logic, I’m native to America. But if you mean that Jewish people in their entirety—that is, all Jewish people around the world—are native to Israel, that simply isn’t true. I am not native to Poland, even if my ancestors came from that region. Perhaps, if I immigrated to Poland and had a child there, my child would be “native”. But if Poland got replaced by Lithuania, and in 2,000 years my decendants come back to the region and declare it Poland, I’d argue that the land is now “Lithuania” and not Poland. If they still want to live there, in Lithuania, that’s fine by me. But Poland could in that situation not exist without kicking out or taking lands from Lithuania. In the context of Israel, I think the Palestinians have a stronger claim to the lands.

As far as Holocaust survivors go, the commenter I was relying to said that they were the decendants of Holocaust survivors (which is true) and thus they are an oppressed people who deserve to be supported over the people who’s houses have been bulldozed and are now outraged.

——

This is a sticky situation, sadly I don’t see any realistic way to resolve this conflict in the region unless we can time travel. One group has longer standing ties to the lands, and the other group has six million people living there that can’t really be easily rehoused in other parts, and don’t want to since they were born there. That being said, the commenter I was replying to had a very Zionist-US propaganda view of the Israeli vs Palestinian conflict. The argument he made for Israel sounds a lot like the arguments made for South Africa during apartheid, in that the government was more democratic and doing better than other regional states and thus should be supported verses the more savage and poorer neighboring elements. I disagree with that statement.

My comments are a little cluttered, and I would love to spend the day talking about this and opening up some of my books and articles about the subject but I have to write a paper and I’m not really focused.

But, I highly reccomend the Citations Needed episode on BDS and the whole topic covered there. They do a great breakdown of US foreign policty from a media criticism perspective, and they go over lots of articles and stuff said about Israel, Palestine and BDS in the media.